I don’t know, that just seems too simple. There’s a good argument to be made that technology can embody political values and power relations, apart from its designers. The “guns don’t kill people” line doesn’t hold much water when all the empirical evidence shows that the mere presence of guns makes us less safe, for example. Similarly, it’s not especially important why tech bros do what they do, or if they have good or bad motives, if the things they make hurt people or destroy the biosphere. The purpose of a thing is what it does, regardless of what its maker intended it to do.

Why not both? We can oppose both Gemini and Pichai

What a wild timeline, when Bruce Springsteen sounds like David Rovics

If you’re picking them, you’re probably paid by the gallon

What a stupid headline for a 300-year-old idea

Introducing E-Corp stablecoin!

Minnesota goddam

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It sounds like your friend has been exposed in a rudimentary way to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), some of the tenets of which are controversial but which makes some solid conceptual points.

One of those more plausible points is that a sovereign currency issuer (like the US, which is the sole issuer of the US dollar), by definition, creates the currency it issues. The federal reserve creates dollars not by taxing or borrowing, but by entering zeroes into a spreadsheet and then spending (or lending) those dollars into the economy, which are only then available to be taxed or borrowed. This is the STAB (spend, then tax and borrow) model.

This differs fundamentally from all other users of the currency, including households (like you and me) as well as US cities and states, which even if they have the power to tax are not currency issuers, and thus have to operate on a TABS (tax and borrow, then spend) model. (They typically can’t run a deficit either and have to balance their budget, unlike the federal government.)

Now, just because conceptually the federal government doesn’t need taxes in order to spend or create money doesn’t mean it’s a good idea! In particular, it may cause inflation. But once we realize that the purpose of taxation is to control the amount of money in circulation, rather than being strictly necessary, it reveals that the limits to spending by a currency issuer are practical (such as how much we can spend before inflation creeps up) rather than conceptual.

One immediate upshot is that if there is enough slack in the real economy to allow spending that wouldn’t create inflation, there’s nothing in principle stopping a currency issuer from doing just that. Another upshot is that this conceptual model gives the lie to all those naysayers who claim that we can’t have nice things because “there’s no money.” In practice we might not do it because we don’t want hyperinflation, but that’s a very different reason from it being impossible in principle.

Informed for sure, but pithy they are not, with a recent post clocking in at 19,000 words!

The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free!

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Smith hated landlords because he hated rentiers, but he was still down with profit. He just thought you should actually, like, produce something of value, instead of being a parasite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

Thanks for the humane reply! Lemmy gives me hope for humanity

Get serious. The FDIC protecting retail investors has nothing to do with Powell bailing out SVB. Nor does democratic control of the Fed (as we had during the New Deal) have anything to do with “burning the Fed down.” What silly false equivalences.

He’s been doing a great job of steadily driving up the price of assets owned by the 1%, including stocks and housing, as well as bailing out Silicon Valley Bank when they gambled with tech bros’ money. He works for Wall Street, not the American people.

This fuck is a lackey of Wall Street with a background in private equity. He’s not your friend or a friend of workers. Fed “independence” isn’t good to defend just because Trump is in office, just like the FBI wasn’t heroic or good because of Comey. Liberals need to stop this schismogenesis, defending a bad person in a bad institution just because Trump picks a fight with them.